Hoping to be a different person tomorrow from the one I am today...

March 11, 2015

I am preparing for Church Council meetings, it is an ongoing thing, and I guess I should not be surprised that the same questions of what we are going to do and where our future lies are once again raising their heads...

The trouble is I think we ask both too much and too little of ourselves at the same time! Let me explain, when questions of survival are raised it is easy for us to focus inward, to draw up lists of our faults, failings and inadequacies. When we do that and we become our own focus it is easy to make anyone who suggests the terrible "C" (change) word the enemy, we ask to little of ourselves because we feel that we are simply unable to do everything. Of course the truth is that we are unable to do everything and the key is to unwrap the gift of that and to see it for what it is. Conversley it is easy to ask too much of ourselves, to make ourselves the architects of "our future" and to run ourselves ragged in trying to push what often seems like a weighty boulder uphill, once again, those who don't want to be moved uphill become our enemies. The result of both is that we isolate ourselves from the communities that we are placed in/ called to and we fail to be the salt and light that Jesus calls us to be.

I know that I am back on my "old soap box" if you want to see that see here, and here, and here; and yes I am rolling out the same quote because for me it is fundamentally important to our ability to engage with a sense of mission, vision and calling: Sarah Savage and Eloene Boyde-McMillan in their book "The Human Face of Church", citing Max Weber they say:

“Weber argued that any great vision require a human process to carry it through time, sometimes in the form of “a man, a mission, a movement, or a monument”. Even with the Body of Christ, the life giving charism has to be embodied in a routine – in some form of human organisation. Yet, life giving visions do not fit easily into neat boxes. So the very process that gives the vision continuing life also begins to kill it. When the maintenance of the institution (which protects the charism) becomes the institutions primary purpose, the death of the charism is on the horizon. Only spiritual revival or reform will re-ignite the gift.” (Savage and Boyd-McMillan 2007. p4)

Too often our desire to either return to a golden age ( which I doubt in truth existed) or to simply mnaintain and protect what we have, causes us to draw up the sides of our neat boxes and repell all boarders whilst worrying , yes still worrying about how to keep that box afloat in a storm.

A recent report comissioned by one of the churches that I serve from an outside party has pointed out that the church is running around circles, it seems that we have adopted the "what do we do now syndrome", I know very well that it was in this mode before I came, and I pray that together we might find the strength to stop running.

More and more I am convinced that this is the answer, the Body of Christ seems to be in crisis, and as I ponder this I ponder the fact that so often we are blinded by our need to succeed, we fear failure above all else and our fear in turn blinds us to the deep and abiding love of God. More and more when faced the question of what shall we do I find myself answering longing to answer, " lets, stop, let's let go, let's love the people in front of us and take things step by step until a wider and greater vision emerges.

Now I know that, that probably sounds like a cop out, but I really don't think it is, because with the stopping will come an intentional letting go and a deep listening. I wonder if while we may think we have been listening we have been too busy running and repeating the same old question so often that we don't realise we are asking it. Letting go calls us to see our emptiness, our inabilities and our lack of vision and to offer them to God, I suspect that maybe it is only then that the blessing will begin to emerge. Maybe being at the end of our own rope will turn out to be a deep blessing:

“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule." ( Matthew 5:3 The Message)

or to quote Richard Rho on the beatitudesr:

Each of these invitations, for that is what they are, are concerned about vulnerable and outpouring relationship, which is necessary for the second half of life, in the same way that the Ten Commandments serve for ego-identity in the first half of life. The Beatitudes are descriptions of a mature human person much more than prescriptions for other-worldly salvation. They offer something astoundingly new to human consciousness, which is a lifestyle based on vulnerability, mutuality, service--and thus a willingness to be usable for God, history, healing, and one another.

So maybe it is time to let go of our fears and need to suceed and see what emerges organically through us:

“I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing. Anyone who separates from me is deadwood, gathered up and thrown on the bonfire. But if you make yourselves at home with me and my words are at home in you, you can be sure that whatever you ask will be listened to and acted upon. This is how my Father shows who he is—when you produce grapes, when you mature as my disciples. (John 15: The Message)

January 18, 2015

Have you ever had an epiphany, a sudden moment a break through where you suddenly but surely understand or see something? It might have been a maths problem at school, a sudden moment when the jumble of numbers that had been giving you so much trouble, causing such a headache suddenly made sense! If that has happened to you I’d love you to explain it to me, or maybe I wouldn’t because I’m still not sure I’d get it!

It might have been something quite different, a sudden knowledge, a breakthrough in understanding of someone else’s situation, a thought that floats into your mind with the answer to something that has been troubling you, a realisation that the thing that has been worrying you for so long is something you need not worry about at all!

That happened in different ways to both Nathanael and to Eli in the Scriptures that we have just heard, yes I did say Eli and not Samuel, because it was Eli who suddenly realised that it was God who was speaking to the boy!

I am going to concentrate on that account first, so what was happening, we are told that the word of the Lord was not heard much/ was rare in those days, that Eli’s family though of a priestly line were rebellious and all doing what pleased them, the old man had all but given up, although he carried on his duties, living and working in the temple he did not expect God to speak or intervene…

I wonder if that speaks into the condition of the church in our day?

Do we expect to hear God, to see God, do we believe that God is interested in us, that God might empower or equip us? Do we hear his voice or see what he is doing among us?

Let’s go back to the story;

The boy Samuel was brought to the temple to serve under Eli, to learn the ways of God, he himself was an answer to prayer, his mother distraught and thinking she was barren went to the temple and prayed, the old priest was altered to her plight and while first thinking she was drunk took time to hear her story…

Are we alert to the needs and stories of those who come among us? Could the answer to their prayers be the answer to our prayers?

Hannah, Samuel’s mother promises to bring the child back to the temple to learn to serve, and once he is weaned he is delivered to Eli’s care. Back to our story then; it is night and the boy and the priest have retired to their beds, then Samuel hears a voice, thinking it is Eli he runs to him, twice the old man sends him back to bed, only on the third time does the realisation that it is God himself that is speaking to the boy dawn on him!

Samuel is instructed to respond to the Lord and the story continues…

I wonder, are we alert to the calling of the Lord in the voices and actions of others?

I have a friend who is passionate about the plight of the Palestinian people, she posts videos and prayers, news articles and photo’s to Facebook, I know she speaks and prays and writes about their plight on a regular basis, every now and then God calls me to prayer through her passion and opens my eyes to pray! I become alert to the passion of God because she is alert to the passion of God.

Other friends have other passions, for me at the moment the situation of the Saudi blogger Rafi, as someone who also blogs I am in many ways horrified that such punishment can be inflicted on somebody for simply writing!

A collective passion in this Church and Circuit is the Comfort Zone, where day by day, week by week we meet with people who have real and desperate stories to tell, and we see people whose lives and situations are being changed, are we alert to the way that God is working and moving among us?

Are we awake enough to hear God speaking to us?

On to Nathanael; “come and see” is the invitation brought to him by an excited Philip, come and see Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, in him we have found the one who the prophets spoke of!

A bold claim, but of course Philip has seen Jesus and is convinced, utterly and completely convinced of the one he has seen! Somehow his encounter with Jesus has changed Philip entirely. Nathanael is not so ready to be convinced, after all how can anything good come out of Nazareth… sounds a bit like a news report about Blackpool, there are days aren’t there where it seems that the only news is bad news!

Nathanael is about to have his mind changed, because Jesus has seen him first! Just pause and think about that for a moment; Jesus has seen him first, he is seen and known and this is revealed to him, and it is not his scepticism that is pointed out to him but his devotion!

When you were knit together in your mothers’ womb, and even before you were made God had a plan for you, he formed you in love and chooses to see the good in you, that is what is revealed to Nathanael, Jesus saw right through the bluff and bluster “ how can anything good come out of Nazareth?” and right to the heart of the man and shows him himself; here you are Nathanael, a true Israelite, there is nothing false in you! It is as if Jesus held a mirror up to Nathanael and showed him the very core of his being, the image of God, and in seeing himself suddenly and surely Nathanael saw Jesus!

Through this passage the Holy Spirit holds a mirror up for us and beckons us to gaze into it; and whispers to us “ here you are fearfully and wonderfully made and I love you! “

“Here you are fearfully and wonderfully made and I love you!”

Like Philip, Nathanael is awakened to the presence and power of God among them in the person of Jesus, like Philip he chooses to follow and becomes a disciple ( a learner), this is how the message and the truth of the Gospel; God is with us, has been passed on through the ages, from person to person, group to group, as one awakens and invites another to come, come and see…

The question for us is have we seen? Have you seen? Do we/ you still see?

Has the word of the Lord become rare in our days as it was in the days of Eli?

How is God speaking to us and through whom?

It is easy to be negative and sceptical , and yet we have story after story coming to us of the way God IS working, when we share we share answers to prayer, we are seeing lives changed, hopefully our lives are being changed…

Let’s dare then to be awake to hear God in and through the Scriptures, in and through our prayers and in and through one another, to remember his promise through Jesus that he is with us, to remember the gift of the Spirit given who will remind us of things long forgotten.

Towards the end of his earthly ministry Jesus told his disciples that they would do greater things than he had… that is his promise to us his church as we dare to see, to follow and to respond in love and service together, perhaps our first task then is to wake up, to become ready to serve and to look for God as s/he works among us!

January 12, 2015

Today I have been battling a migraine, and while it has mostly passed and my head feels more manageable I have also been batting a major depressive episode that has been creeping up on me over the last week. I began to notice that I was sleeping a lot and struggling with social things, work is mostly OK but I am having to take my time and do things one step at a time. Interestingly when folk have asked how I am and when I have spoken to people today I have been more likely to mention the migraine than the depression; the reason is simple, as much as I talk about what it is like to live with depression it is really not very well understood. Twice last week I was asked whether or not I had managed to pull myself together as if that were a real and physical/mental possibility.

I am much better than I was in November but am very aware that I am not operating at full capacity, I am able to work but sometimes the demands of work mean that I need to take time out to breathe, that breathing may mean walking or drawing and I see both as a form of prayer because they give me space to root myself in God.

So should I berate myself for suffering from depression? Would I berate myself for having a complex break to my leg or heart disease? No I would consider them painful and difficult and would probably receive more understanding and support than I get when I say apologetically , "actually today has been a tough day", but the truth is today has been a tough day and I barely got through yesterday, yes I stood and led a Covenant Service, and I am thankful for those who thanked me for it, and I knew that I was doing the right thing because the prayer we prayed speaks for itself;

'I am no longer my own but yours. Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you, exalted for you, or brought low for you; let me be full, let me be empty, let me have all things, let me have nothing: I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure and disposal. And now, glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you are mine and I am yours. So be it. And the covenant now made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.'

You see being depressed is not a sign of lack of faith, nor is it a sign of weakness, in fact I would dare to say that to stand firmly in the deep love of God in Christ is more of a strength than a weakness. I can truly say that I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me, but not that Christ strengthens me to do all things. Depression is teaching me to rest in Christ, teaching me to accept my limitations and to say no, teaching me that if I push myself beyond the boundaries of self care and self love, both of which Jesus taught, that I have no strength. Depression is teaching me to draw deep from the ancient wells of contemplation and meditation and to realise that the power of the Gospel is not the power of the world and the triumph of God has more to do with the cross and the slowly, gently, quietly revealed ressurection. The ressurection that loosed the deep spiritual power of regeneration, of rediscovering, or returning to who we truly are in those who dared to see it as it is.

I am no longer my own, and in that truth I rest, as for God I trust that because he loved me first all will be well. So I accept that if I am to love God and to love others then I need to learn to love and care for myself, and through that I am finding a well of wisdom, not in my self love, but because at the end of all love there is God's creative, re-creative, healing presence...

January 07, 2015

Again and again we hear about how more and more people ar turning to foodbanks for support, each week our little project in Blackpool feeds aproximately 150/ 200people and gives out around 90 food bags. The gathered community have become our friends, and as we hear their stories a new themes are emerging ever more strongly and I know that it is echoed in other parts of the country too. Not only are we seeing more and more people sleeping rough, 12 signed in today, 12 people who came to us, who will be looking for somewhere safe in the town to sleep on a night where the forecast is for torrential rain and high winds! We long to do more but are aware that if we break with insurance and safety guidelines we will be closed down altogether! So we weep every week as we have to turn people out into the cold and the wet!

The other theme that bothers me greatly is a policy implemented by the Local Council that says that unless you have had consistent local connections for 3 years or more then you do not qualify for housing help, or even in some cases emergency food parcels of payments. We are seeing more and more people who quite simply slip through the cracks, the story changes if they manage to find a private landlord, but all that does is open a can of worms of abuse and sometimes appalling housing conditions.

Now I understand the dilema of the Council, though I do not agree with all of their reasoning, because like so many areas of Government spending grants and monies available have been slashed. BUT it seems that as with so many things it is almost always the poor who are being penalised. I heard of one local council ( not Blackpool) decision recentlyt not to offer food parcels or emergency payments to folk who have been sanctioned! How can we even begin to claim we are a civilised country when 5,500 people were admitted to hospital suffering from malnutrition last year, and I am certain many more teeter on the brink of it or are simply going unnoticed and untreated.

As for those who are disenfranchised, those who slip between the cracks consistently I can only share a story of a family who came to us a couple of months ago. They had come fleeing domestic violence, their home for the previous 6 months had been a seaside town in another part of the country. They came to Blackpool through a friendship and an offer of help, but they needed more. Mistakenly they thought that because they were fleeing a violent situation that help would be forthcoming, but the authorities hands were tied, they could not be offered anything more than a ticket "home", but the home that they were fleeing did not count as home because they had not lived there for long enough, and the home they wanted to return to no longer welcomed them with an offer of help because they had been away for too long.

Thankfully with a bit of ingenuity on their part and with some assistance from us they managed to secure a flat which whilst far from ideal gave them some shelter and a starting point, as they weren't eligible for a Council Sponsored Food Parcel we helped them out and they are slowly finding their feet. At the Comfort Zone we choose not to operate within the councils eligibility guidelines ( though we do operate within all health and safety and insurance protocols) because we are aware that too many people are falling between the cracks. When you meet folk who don't eat on a regular basis, folk who choose consistently between heating and eating you begin to understand the harsh reality that faces so many. We cannot with integrity refuse to see our neighbour in the folk who come to us, we cannot demand that they pull themselves together and sort themselves out, we cannot send them away empty and unloved and so we do what we can.

The Comfort Zone is a project of Blackpool Methodist Circuit, it is supported by the generous giving of the members of the Circuit and many many more who hold us in prayer and send us gifts often in surprising ways. I was once asked by my postman what on earth I was ordering now, the simple response was that the 3 large parcels were sleeping bags from some of our extended community all over the country who see what we do and give. We also receive tin openers, tea-lights, and maybe strangest of all our Chaplain,Lynn receives a regular gift of Potnoodles in the post! We could not keep going without the generosity and prayers of the many folk who help out, or the dedication of our volunteers who consistently go above and beyond anything we could dare ask of them.

Best of all we have many good news stories to tell, the people who come to us are in the main folk who have fallen on hard times and when given encouragement and support, love and friendship offer us so much more in return. We have a number of former "clients" (I dislike that word) who are no volunteers. We are given gifts by those who once received them, they are our neighbours and we are theirs, and I truly believe that this is what the kingdopm of heaven is like, love and respect, value and compassion shared in mutuality!

Here are the statistics gathered by Lynn:

So, we have worked out that last year we have served (roughly!) Hot free meals - 9000 Food parcels - 6000 Homeless kits (sleeping bags etc!) - 2000 Jumpers and warm clothes - 3000 Flats for people sleeping outside - 25 ( each one a miracle !) Babies born (one delivered by a volunteer !) - 4. Hugs - Endless. Prayers - 10,000 (ish!) Candles - 5000. Love and acceptance - unquantifiable ! We have also grown from a "project" into a community and a Church. ( we regularly share in communion) We have seen some of the community find faith, grow in faith and join Churches. Volunteers have been on a huge journey with tears, frustrations and joy. We have had amazing people who have donated so much to us which in turn has kept us open ! People around the world pray with us. We are truly blessed.

THIS YEAR WE DO IT ALL AGAIN ! Thank you for being part of the community. With much love from all of us. xxx

December 13, 2014

It is a bright December morning, the sun is streaming in through my windows and I am trying to prepare myself for Messy Church this afternoon. The trouble is that I don't feel upbeat or capable of being bright and cheery and Christmassy. I want to turn down the sun, crawl back under my duvet and hide. I am not going to do that, but I am also not going to try to be something I am not, I cannot force myself into a state of celebration so instead I am choosing to cling to hope, a hope that new life truly does begin in the dark. I am going to cling to the hope that even now deep within my soul seeds of life and light are slowly but surely putting down roots and waiting there in the rich darkness for the call of spring.

As I read the Gospel narritives over and over I am struck that even in the blaze of angel song the unfolding revelation of God with us in Christ Jesus was an almost unnoticed affair, words of hope passed down through the ages born were born not in a blaze of light but in vulnerability and poverty. This miracle of God taking on flesh calls to us to allow him to be born and reborn over and over within our flesh, our hearts our souls, and even our minds, that we might know in our vulnerability and pocerty "Christ in us the hope of glory"!

So today I choose hope, hope gentle and strong, a hope that never gives up and always wins through because my hope is not in myself but in the one who loved me first. In this divine revelation I might find the strength to allow that love to flow through me to others, and maybe even to myself...